Great guitarists and singers don't record them selves with a condenser microphone on a tape-recorder.

If you want to start recording your self and stand even a halfway decent chance of sounding reasonable, you will need to spend about 500 bucks.

I started with a Tascam 424 mk III (~300), a Sure SM58 or SM57 (~100 each) microphone, some XLR to XLR microphone cable (20-50) and a set of headphones (20-200).

You may also want to think about an Alesis Midiverb IV or something similar for a bit of reverb / echo (~200).

All of these things can be found at http://www.music123.com